Legal Lying

This is my first post since the beloved Kathy Patrick took over the Southern Authors Blogspot from our champion, Karin Gillespie. My instructions are to re-introduce myself  (and because I’m such a good girl I’ll do exactly as I’m told).

Okay, so I’m lying about being a good girl, which is probably why I’m a writer. I write fiction, which is a legal form of lying, of being a bad girl. You see, I grew up a Preacher’s Kid, which really means I grew up as a cliché. I wanted to be The Good Girl. The Quiet Girl. The Godly Girl. But I usually ended up in trouble anyway. Somehow my mouth and my words were the vehicles that helped me find my way into predicaments that required discipline.

So along the tripping and falling path of life, I decided that if words had that much power, I would use them; I would spend my life wrapping those very same words around my life and my stories. And that is exactly what I have done and I am blessed to still be doing.

I am a natural ‘wonderer’; spending my days wondering why and how people and things are the way they are. It is only in hindsight I see what I have done with my fiction: I take a perfectly happy and innocent person and I put them in a situation that forces them to make a choice. They can no longer go the way they were going; no longer believe what they believed; no longer think what they were thinking; no longer love the way they were loving; no longer smile the way they were smiling (okay, you get the point). This character of mine MUST choose now, and I write as I wonder: what will they do?

And to continue on my “obedient” path – Kathy has asked us to share some small tidbits of our life that others just don’t know. If you don’t want to know this, stop reading now. Here are some insignificant facts of me; I was runner-up Miss Sunshine at a mall in Coral Springs, Florida; I published my thesis on closed heard injuries in a magazine titled Neuroscience Nursing (bet you never read it); I want to be a country music singer/songwriter but I can’t sing or write songs; I love words and where they came from and why; My favorite songwriters are Vince Gill and Billy Joel; I love my kids so much that it makes my heart ache; Stories enrich my life in a way nothing else could ever do.

Okay, enough about me. Let’s go read some good fiction….

Patti Callahan Henry is the NYT Bestselling author of seven novels (Losing the Moon, Where the River Runs, When Light Breaks; Between the Tides; The Art of Keeping Secrets; Driftwood Summer and The Perfect Love Song: A Holiday Story). She lives outside Atlanta Georgia with her husband and three children where she is working on her next novel.